Save your money for something good and enjoyable

Absolutely Fantastic

Let me be very fair here, this is not the best movie in my opinion. But, this movie is fun, it has purpose and is very enjoyable to watch.

There are moments in this movie where the great movie it could've been peek out... They're fleeting, here, but they're worth savoring, and they happen often enough to make it worth your while.

"Hue and Cry", one of the earliest and freshest of the Ealing comedies, now has that look of what my children and grandchildren call "the olden days" rather than yesteryear. What more fascinating document to capture the look of London in the immediate post war period for historians! Because this is escapist fare no mention is made of the blitz. Bombsites are presented as one vast amusement park where the youngsters of the film cavort and have fun. In Britain during the 'forties filmmakers were going great guns on escaping the studios for interesting locations, albeit, in this case, acres of debris. For a climax the chase was the big thing and what better than bringing the goodies and the baddies together for one massive punch up in a bomb damaged urban landscape, location work that more than makes up for some pretty phony looking studio backdrops in places. "Hue and "Cry" is a hugely enjoyable romp in which a gang of youngsters led by the engagingly cockney Harry Fowler take on and eventually foil a gang of crooks led by laughing mastermind Jack Warner after discovering that their favourite 'penny dreadful' is being used as the means to convey instructions for criminal activities. Because almost everyone enjoyed a caricature in those days, there is the larger than life Alistair Sim to provide that added dimension of playful eccentricity in the person of the innocent writer who is completely unaware of the use to which his stories are being put. It all leads via a scene in the London sewers, predating "The Third Man", to the glorious climax where all the boys of the capital and one girl descend, quite literally in one case, on the baddies. And what better to round it all off than a shot of angelic choirboys, bandaged, black eyed and gap toothed,singing "Oh! for the Wings of a Dove!"

The word 'hue' is Middle English (derived from Old French) and means 'to shout or make an outcry'. 'Hue and cry' derives from the Anglo-Norman French dialect of a thousand years ago, 'hu e cri', and describes the outcry made to call for the pursuit of a felon, or the pursuit itself of such a criminal. By extension, it came later to be applied to the noise, blown horn, and shouting made when English hunters and their hounds spotted a fox and set off in pursuit of it. At the time this film was made, 'hue and cry' was a phrase known to everyone in England and was frequently used in conversation. It only died out in the 1980s. Before that, if there were a big fuss in the press over some political issue, people would say: 'What a hue and cry there has been in the papers today about the Prime Minister's policy,' or if justice were not seen to be done, they would say: 'They have set up a terrible hue and cry over that issue recently in legal circles'. In other words, by the 1960s 'make a hue and cry' had come to mean 'make a loud fuss'. It was a phrase that was used daily all over the country for decades, but is now as forgotten as the dodo, since most of the people who used it as a common expression are dead, and they did not perpetuate this usage amongst their children, who viewed it as old-fashioned, and dropped it. This film was shot on location in 1946 in London, and gives mind-boggling views of the extent of the ruins left after the wartime bombing. Anyone familiar with London simply gasps with disbelief at shot after shot of rubble and collapsed buildings, in which this gang of street kinds regularly play. The ruins are as extreme as those of bombed-out Germany which were shown in the newsreels and recur in documentaries about the War today. Seeing how extensive the devastation of London really was brings the issue of the British Bomber Command into better focus, and reminds us that the decision to bomb the German cities as flat as pancakes had something to do with rage. War is war, you know, a point often forgotten in our spoilt age of today. People today seem to think that war can be fought remotely with drones, or that war is something which takes place in distant deserts and mountains. But take the contemporary American outrage at 9/11 and multiply it by a thousand, and you will get some idea of how the British felt about the Germans, and many still do ('bloody Krauts, now running the European Union as a Fourth Reich!' as I have heard it said). So this film has an importance far beyond its story line, which is a charming one about children bringing criminals to justice and setting up a hue and cry about them when the police can and will do nothing. The one portion of the story which is really rather silly is the character of the writer of children's' comics played in an over-the-top doddering fashion by Alastair Sim. That was terribly overdone, and the excess of whimsy makes one queasy. The story involves children's comics being doctored to carry instructions to real criminal gangs for their next robberies, hence the children figuring it out and taking action. The British have always been inclined to believe that secret coded messages were carried in their newspapers. Harry Jonas the artist and Walter Sickert's illegitimate son whose name I have now forgotten used to tell me that the secret to Jack the Ripper's identity had been revealed in the crossword puzzles carried by the Daily Mail, which was also used to convey coded instructions to British secret agents. They believed all of this absolutely, and I have met others who did. The Americans thus do not have a monopoly on paranoia and conspiracy theories, as these were widespread in Britain long before they became fashionable in the USA. Here we have an entire film released in 1947 based upon one, and a semi-comedy at that. This film, an Ealing production, is often called the first Ealing comedy. I would not call it a comedy per se, but it has a definite comic side to it. Nor would I call it a fantasy film, as the setting and the kids are too 'real' for that. Many of the kids do brilliantly, especially the one tough street girl amongst the gang of boys, played by the truly inspired actress Joan Dowling, in her very first screen role at the age of 17 (she died at the age of 26). These kids represent the authentic Cockney tradition of the East End of London with their self-reliance, cheekiness, irreverence, and daring, and much of the action takes place at Chadwell near Tilbury in the East End. (An ancestor of mine lived at the manor house of Chadwell, called 'The Long House', in the seventeenth century when it was all farms, strangely enough. But it subsequently became a Cockney slum area when London expanded in the 19th century.) The film is superbly directed (except for the Alastair Sim sections) by Charles Crichton, whose last film which he directed at the age of 78, was the hilarious hit, A FISH CALLED WANDA (1988). He also directed part of the great classic film TRAIN OF EVENTS (1949, see my review, and my comments there about the spectacularly brilliant actress Joan Dowling, mentioned above), and is famous for THE LAVENDER HILL MOB (1951). Another extraordinary aspect of this film is the section where the kids wander through the London sewer system, which I have never encountered in any other British film. Everything about this film makes it worth watching, and certainly enjoyable for anyone who does not require continuous 'smash bang' on a drip.

This film is tremendous good fun, from the deliberately zany credit sequence onwards, and still goes down a treat with the youngsters at a Saturday morning matinée. A good deal of it really is pretty funny on a laugh-out-loud level, although it's not a comedy as such -- the jokes are generally in the throw-away lines and visual gags rather than in the plot as such, which is more of a children's adventure story. (It's notable to a modern eye that in the 1940s, the adolescent heroes of this story are all at work and earning in their mid-teens: there's one sequence at the end where we see what is basically a montage of all the different potential boys' jobs in London, from the BBC to the G.P.O. via the ice-cream trade!) The story is the classic Enid Blyton/Anthony Buckeridge-style tale of the over-imaginative child who stumbles upon genuine villainy and perceives it in terms of an unsophisticated thriller, only for the adults, unsurprisingly, not to believe a word. The plausibility does get strained a bit when it transpires that all the exotic villains listed in the pulp-fiction stories of "The Trump" are genuine London criminals under the command of the sinister mastermind, not to mention the fact that all the authority figures in the film turn out to be in on the plot, but it's a good, fast-moving production that bears a strong resemblance to children's books of the era and presumably appealed to the same audience. I was actually surprised to find the film unexpectedly sophisticated: it offers considerable enjoyment on an adult level and I wonder how many children even at the time would have got all the comic allusions. (It is also remarkable as one of the few films of any genre where a vehicle crashes over the edge and *doesn't* burst into flames!)To the modern eye, of course, the location shooting also offers a fascinating document of a world that has all but utterly disappeared, from Covent Garden to the post-war bomb-sites, and a society that has gone with it, from bus conductors to milk-carts. Alistair Sim has an entertaining cameo as a timid writer of thrilling tales, but the film is mainly carried by the boys, who are by and large very natural in their acting style. Harry Fowler in the lead is particularly good.This is a well-made little film that plays tricks with its genre and with its audience's expectations and deserves a wider reputation: I knew it only from a few seconds' montage in a documentary on Ealing Studios, and it is far less widely available than their famous later output. The Ealing film of which I was reminded most closely -- perhaps because of a similar setting -- was actually "Passport to Pimlico", although this is clearly pitched at a younger audience.

This was the first of the Ealing comedies and after fifty years it is still entertaining.The only thing that hasn't stood the test of time is the overacting of Alistair Sim as a writer of boy's adventure stories. The kids in the film are wonderfully natural.Pictorially it is an interesting look at a London still suffering from the war. Most of the film was shot on location and the kids playgrounds were the bomb damaged buildings. During the climatic scenes there are some magnificent shots, taken from above, where it appears as though every kid in London is rushing through the streets to help capture the criminals.Oddly enough, although very different, the movie had somewhat the same scenic look as THE THIRD MAN. Both were set in bomb damaged cities and in HUE AND CRY there is even a scene where the kids escape through the sewers of London, predating Harry Lime's famous scene in the sewers of Vienna.North Americans may find the accents rather a deterrent but I think the film is well worth the effort.